Blog, what the think.

Why is the “male” perspective the default in art?

While the men of RIT are prone to complaining about the lack of women on campus, and sometimes have an air of entitlement in regards to women’s attention, the general attitude on campus is one of respect towards women. However, it’s often the little things that show our society’s overwhelmingly negative behavior towards women.

I’m not talking about the attacks on Planned Parenthood or Title X in this post (although I will try to speak about this soon. If your representative in the senate is anti-choice please CALL THEM. If they’re pro-choice, call them anyways to thank them for not alienating and taking away the bodily autonomy of half of their constituents. Stand united.)

I’m talking about the belief that things that women can relate to things made by and created for men while men cannot relate to things made by and created for women.

For my 2D design class we were allowed to create multi-media projects on the subject of our choice. I bounced around for a bit, considering covering the topics of gender roles recognized in childhood, the relationship my sister and I shared then and now, and finally settling on how time can affect memory. How my perception of my childhood reveals how much I have changed and how time affects our views.

Here are four of the eight I used. The rest will soon be visible on my deviantart account.

More after the jump!

To work with this subject I decided to build a dollhouse. This was the greatest challenge. I had to bribe my roommate’s boyfriend to chauffeur me around for an afternoon in order to buy the wood, screws, and paint necessary for this project. I decided that the dollhouse would be huge. It would reflect how I viewed dollhouses and life then, everything was large, ridiculously so. The dollhouse I viewed today would be similar to how I viewed its size as a child.

It took me a few sleepless nights to cut the wood to the correct size, build the house, and paint it (complicating things is that I live in the dorms. No power tools or huge messy projects inside. Luckily my RA was gone for a while, and when it became clear that she knew what was going on it also became clear that she didn’t care, or at least care enough to stop me!) I painted the porcelain dolls white with gesso, glued them in place, and arranged a number of framed paintings inside the main room of the house.

I was so proud of what I had made. I had never built a project this large before, and I rarely work in 3D. What I had made was special, and, I thought, actually pretty great.